We often say that your website is the hub of your marketing efforts. But what does this exactly mean, and why is it your most important marketing tool? After all, you have lots of other marketing methods at your disposal to raise awareness of your business and generate leads. Why is there such a huge emphasis on your business website?
While it’s true that you can reach your audience through a variety of mediums – social media, paid Google ads, review sites such as Yelp, radio or TV commercials, email marketing, and print materials (to name a few) – you need a place for your audience to go to learn more about your business and the products/services you offer. This place is your website.
All of these other mediums are intended to drive traffic to your website. This is because no matter how and where someone discovers your business, they will always reference your website to dig deeper if you’ve piqued their interest. As a result, your website becomes an extremely powerful tool that has a greater ability to impact the success of your business than all your other marketing efforts combined.
Regardless of the industry you’re in, your website presence can be your biggest lead and revenue generator. When you make your business website your primary marketing tool, you will exponentially expand your ability to grow your company. However, for this to occur, it must be designed well and provide a great user experience. Otherwise, you’re missing out on a great opportunity to connect with your audience, build your brand, and provide them with the ability to take your desired action(s), such as:
- Scheduling a consultation
- Requesting a demo
- Signing up for your newsletter
- Purchasing your products
The following reasons will explain why your business website is so important, and why it should always be your primary marketing tool.
Your Website Is an Ambassador for Your Brand
Establishing a strong brand is one of the most important components to growing your business. Your brand creates a series of positive associations between your company and the moments of happiness in people’s lives. It defines what you stand for, creates expectations in the minds of individuals who hear your name, and builds an emotional connection that helps you convert your audience into customers/clients. It’s also an important way to differentiate your business from your competitors.
Your website is the most effective way to showcase your brand to your audience since it’s the easiest way for them to find reliable, high quality information about your business. It provides an avenue to convey every aspect of your brand in detail, including your:
- Colors and fonts
- Photos, videos and other visual representations of your brand
- Content and tone
- Logos
Most importantly, your business website provides you with a medium to tell your whole story to your audience. It allows you to create a more in-depth explanation of your team, history, products/services, purpose and values, and expertise. All of these parts of your story help reinforce the other elements of your brand listed above.
Showcasing your brand completely on your business website builds a powerful connection with your audience. When this brand messaging is consistent throughout all of your marketing materials, your website will reinforce the impression your audience gathers on your social media profiles, in your print ads and on your videos. The end result is a more compelling story that helps influence your audience to take your desired actions.
Your Website Establishes Your Credibility
One of the primary benefits of a well designed business website is that it will improve your credibility among your audience. You most likely have several competitors offering similar products/services to yours. When evaluating their options, your audience will typically choose the business that most effectively establishes credibility and earns their trust. Your website is a powerful tool to build this credibility among your audience.
Your business website establishes credibility in a variety of ways:
- It provides reliable, quality information that educates your audience
- It highlights your background, credentials and expertise
- It provides examples of the quality work you’ve produced for other customers/clients
- It creates a cohesive message that reinforces the impression your audience gained from other channels such as your social media profiles
- It provides a good experience that reflects what your audience can expect when they work with you
- It conveys a level of professionalism
- It links out to third-party review websites that can confirm your legitimacy and reputation
On the other hand, having a poorly designed website that provides a poor user experience – or even worse, not having a website at all – can be devastating for your credibility and drive your audience to your competitors who do a better job at building trust with their website.
Your Website Increases Your Visibility to Your Target Audience
We live in a digital age, and people have become increasingly reliant on the internet to find the information they need. Today, most people start researching the products and services they need by conducting a search on Google. Having a strong website that ranks well on search engines is critical to your ability to reach your audience when they conduct their research.
Search engine results don’t highlight social media profiles, specific tweets on a subject matter, or TV ads. They feature websites that provide the most relevant information associated with your search. Without a well designed business website that utilizes SEO best practices, you will fail to reach a large portion of your potential audience.
Moreover, traditional marketing methods such as radio ads, TV ads and direct mailers have become less impactful in the digital age. With the overwhelming majority of people consuming music on streaming platforms, radio audiences have dwindled. Similarly, the rise of streaming platforms such as Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime have caused many people to cut out their cable package, limiting the reach that can be achieved by TV ads.
Even other digital tools such as social media profiles provide more of a supplemental role in expanding your visibility, as people are unlikely to follow your page if they’re unable to find your website to discover your company. For these reasons, a website is critical to establishing the visibility with your target audience necessary to grow your business.
Your Website Houses All of Your Educational Content
Your business website serves as your primary source of information for your audience. It’s where you can post blogs, thought leadership pieces and other educational content that provides a valuable resource for your audience. This content is critical to your ability to establish your business as an industry leader.
You can also use your website to offer highly detailed guides, case studies, charts, research papers and other materials that can be downloaded. These pieces not only provide your audience with the information they need to make decisions on their purchases, but it helps you capture their contact information, allowing you to leverage email marketing strategies to continue nurturing a relationship with these people.
Without a good website, you won’t have a central location to showcase all of this material. This will make it much more challenging to educate your audience about your products/services and demonstrate that you’re an industry leader.
Your Website Allows You to Gather Valuable Data About Your Customers and Marketing Strategies
Your website provides a wealth of data that can help you to better understand your audience and evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. You can track a variety of important metrics, including:
- Total website visits
- Number of unique website visitors
- Number of return website visitors
- Page views
- Bounce rates
- Conversion rates
- Time on page
- How far readers typically scroll down the page
- Which call to action (CTA) buttons are being clicked most often
- Which items on your web pages are generating the greatest levels of engagement
- Top sources of your website traffic
You can use this data to learn more about your audience. You can identify the messaging that resonates with them most, the most common questions they’re asking, and what motivates them to take action. This allows you to more effectively market to them and improve conversions.
This data can also help you understand which marketing strategies are achieving the best results. This allows you to refine your approach in order to focus on the efforts that generate the best return on your investment.
No other marketing tool delivers as much actionable data as your website. While other digital tools such as social media and email marketing provide useful data, it’s much more limited in scope than what you can gather on your website. In addition, gathering data is virtually impossible with most traditional offline marketing strategies.
If you want to evaluate the performance of your marketing strategies and make highly informed decisions on how to improve these efforts, your website plays a critical role in compiling the data you need.
Webolutions Can Help You Maximize the ROI of Your Business Website
If you’re not leveraging the benefits of your website to drive leads and grow your business, it may be time to revamp it. Webolutions can help with your business website redesign, allowing you to maximize the potential of your marketing efforts.
We’ve been Denver’s leading web design agency since 1994. Our award winning websites are designed with one goal in mind – to help your business thrive. You’ll benefit from our Websites Right Methodology™ which provides a fully integrated, strategic approach to website development. This unique process has been refined over three decades based on the experience of building thousands of websites. It allows us to develop a truly customized website that conveys your brand messaging, highlights the transformation you achieve in the lives of your customers, and provides a powerful lead generation tool.
With our Websites Right Methodology™, you’ll enjoy an exceptional client experience every step of the way. But more importantly, your new business website will deliver the superior marketing performance you need to achieve your marketing goals.
Contact us today to schedule a free consultation. Webolutions serves businesses nationwide from our offices in Denver, Colorado.
